As a Legend of Mana fan myself, seeing the number of characters they drew increase before my eyes made me feel very happy.

Oyamada: Generally, we selected them based mainly around our companions in what we call the main scenario, but the animators had been players of the original as well, so they started wanting to include this character and that. How did you decide which characters would be featured in it? There were some points that we were unsure whether they were bugs or indeed intentional, and replicating them in both game environments was tough…Ī new opening animation appears in this rerelease. We don’t have the original game documents from back then on hand anymore, so we were verifying movements visually by playing both the original and what we had created from the ground up. However, we had received feedback from players who wished they’d been able to play the Ring Ring Land mini-game, so we newly recomposed it so that it would function within the game. Oyamada: The North American version, which was used as a base for this game, had originally been adjusted so that it could be played without the Ring Ring Land. How did you prepare the Ring Ring Land PocketStation game for the Legend of Mana remaster? What sort of extra work and effort went into making it accessible and compatible? Oyamada: We drew additional art for areas that needed to be supplemented so that it would fit the 16:9 screen. Legend of Mana offers a 16:9 aspect ratio for this release. With remasters, it’s a battle against the fans’ romanticized recollections, so it was quite difficult. We’ve tried creating high-resolution character art in the past, but we decided to leave it as-is because we thought that leaving them in pixel form would be better for allowing people to play without interfering with their memories from the past. We were conflicted about changing the characters to make them high resolution: was making them high resolution the right thing to do in the first place? It was an area where our views within the team were split. So, even though we had a base, we did dedicate a somewhat considerable amount of time to prepare them. When changing what was originally in a 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9, there were certainly many areas that needed to be newly illustrated, and we also needed to incorporate considerations for present-day ethics into the designs. Oyamada: Even before we began, an immediate challenge was that the game had a massive amount of volume, with 27 lands, and almost all of the backgrounds were unique. In terms of difficulty, how challenging was it to bring Legend of Mana to new consoles? Given its sprite-based characters and background designs, did that make it easier to work with? That’s when the production of this title started.

Their proposal was so passionate that I felt compelled to first make the game become playable on current consoles worldwide. approached us about turning it into an anime series. It was also just around that same time that Warner Bros. When we released the Super Famicom version of Trials of Mana outside of Japan for the first time through Collection of Mana, I remember European players telling me that they wanted us to localize Legend of Mana as well.Īt the time, Trials of Mana was still in development, so we weren’t able to start working on it right away. Masaru Oyamada, Square Enix: If I think back to when we started considering it, that would be around 2019. Jenni Lada, Siliconera: When did work on the Legend of Mana remaster begin and how did it end up being picked for this revival of sorts? Siliconera caught up with Producer Masaru Oyamada to talk about preparing it for new platforms. Not to mention the upcoming anime adaptation. Since its PlayStation roots, Legend of Mana has grown, and the recent remaster meant even more people could enjoy it.

Legend of Mana is one of those games that’s been getting a larger and larger audience.

Legend of mana remaster